Your WebFaction account: email

This is the second post in an in-depth series on what’s included with your WebFaction account. In today’s installment, it’s time to take a look at email. Email’s easy to take for granted, but your account includes several email features that ought to make life with email a little easier. Let’s look at the highlights:

Spam filteringWe take broad measures to prevent spam from reaching your inbox, like rejecting mail from servers that are misconfigured or known to be operated by spammers. We also run SpamAssassin, an open source tool for detecting spam, to give a spam score to every incoming message. With the control panel you can choose how spam messages are handled: have them immediately discarded, have them put into a spam folder or, for advanced users, have them processed with custom filtering rules.

Automatic mail toolsAside from spam detection, you can set up other ways to automatically deal with email. You can forward incoming messages to another address, or you can set up autoresponders to let people know when you can’t respond yourself. You can even choose to direct incoming messages to a script to process with your favorite programming language.

Many ways to get your mailOnce you’ve received mail, you have several ways to access it. You can configure your mail client to access mail stored on the server with IMAP, or to download mail with POP. To send mail, you can use SMTP. And if you don’t want to run a dedicated mail client, you can log in to WebFaction’s webmail interface.

Unlimited email addressesFeel free to set up as many email addresses as you like. You can add addresses with the control panel, and you have the flexibility to have a single mailbox receive messages for multiple addresses. You can also receive as much mail as you like, provided you don’t exceed your account’s disk space limits.

With this set of features, email with WebFaction can be used in a variety of ways. Individuals can set up their favorite email client or use the webmail interface to exchange mail with friends and family or clients and colleagues. Likewise, your web applications can benefit from email communications, like sending welcome email or password reset messages.

We hope this post gives you a better idea of the mail capabilities of your WebFaction account. For more details, check out our mail documentation, and if you have any questions, join us in the Q&A Community.

4 Responses to Your WebFaction account: email

Have you guys ever given any thought to adding the calendar module to Roundcube? I’d love to ditch Yahoo calendar, but my experiments with the various standalone calendar scripts have all been unsatisfactory.

The perfect addition to this would be an autoresponder that each email user can use without needing the keys to the whole server – much in the same way that users can change their own passwords. Also the ability to schedule start and end times for the autoresponder so that people can “set and forget”. There are several threads on this in the forum, one with going on 2000 views. Thanks for considering!